COLLEGE ART GALLERY 2 PAST EXHIBITIONS

CURTIS SANTIAGO / CONSTRUCTING RETURN

THE ARTIST IN DIALOGUE WITH THE CURATOR:Curtis Santiago and Magdalyn AsimakisTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 AT 12 NOON, GORDON SNELGROVE GALLERY

An accompanying exhibition essay written by Nomaduma Rosa Masilela and Magdalyn Asimakis will be available in the gallery for take-away.

Through drawing, painting, sculpture and video, Curtis Santiago instinctively moves between places and media to access his past in order to understand what Stuart Hall refers to as the ‘diasporic experience.’ This survey presents bodies of work developed in Canada, the United States, Trinidad, and South Africa that unpack the ways we look at and structure the past as a way of understanding the present.

-Curator, Magdalyn Asimakis

MELANIE AUTHIER: CONTRARIETIES & COUNTERPOINTS

May 12 - Aug 19, 2017Curated by Robert Enright

The visually rich spaces in Ottawa artist Melanie Authier’s paintings remind us that we are still negotiating a myriad of questions when we consider art after Modernism. For Authier, paintings are not simply discrete aesthetic objects. They exist within an expanded set of relations.

Authier’s paintings invoke language that is associated with High Modernist Abstraction. Her approach has also been likened to Baroque, for the empathetic effects elicited by her technique. The intermingling of styles in each painting engenders a liminal quality that is at once intelligible yet elusive. In this exhibition of recent work on canvas and paper, we can appreciate that contrasting approaches to contemporary painting are being deployed. With each work, Authier sets up a problem so that she can “produce a response to it that is unexpected.”

This artist plays with competing histories of style—hard-edge and gestural abstraction—and subverts them as expertly as she manipulates acrylics upon her surface of choice. The challenges posed by freighted histories of painterly practice are ones that Authier addresses head on and with a flourish.

Text by: Michelle Gewurtz(Ottawa Art Gallery)

Circulated by Thames Art Gallery.

This exhibition has been organized by the Thames Art Gallery in partnership with the Ottawa Art Gallery (Ottawa, Ontario), Art Gallery of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario), Kenderdine Art Gallery (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), Galerie de I’UQAM (Montreal, Quebec), MSVU Art Gallery (Halifax, Nova Scotia), and the Musée régional de Rimouski (Rimouski, Quebec) with funding from the Ontario Arts Council’s Ontario, National and International Touring programs.

MATERIAL GIRLS

Material Girls is about women taking up space. This large-scale group exhibition brings together Canadian and international emerging, mid-career, and senior female artists from across artistic disciplines and cultural backgrounds. Uniting these works is an exploration of material process and notions of excess as they relate to the feminized body, gendered space, and capitalist desire. Sumptuous, decorative and visually overwhelming, the exhibition space becomes a horror vacui, a jubilant and visceral counterpoint to the standard conventions of the austere white cube.